Author(s)

Zongyue Xue ¹, Yutao Gong ²

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Public Economics and Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, P.R. China
² School of Finance, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, P.R. China

Corresponding Author

Yutao Gong

ABSTRACT

Understanding of the complex physiological and psychological effects of air pollution has grown in recent years. Based on the comments on Jinjiang Literature City, a large Chinese network literature website, Baidu online search index and air quality data in 323 Chinese prefecture-level cities from January 1, 2018 to January 20, 2020, this research reveals that the sentiment of comments improve significantly as air quality deteriorates, while reading behavior also increase significantly. Moreover, this effect is found in positive style works of literature rather than negative style works of literature. These empirical results indicate that network literature has a significant “relieving effect” on residents’ moods, relieving the negative emotions associated with air pollution. Our research demonstrates that changes in air quality can have broader effects on residents’ behaviors and moods over short periods of time than people originally thought. Therefore, efforts to prevent and control air pollution should be strengthened. Subsequent tests of the dependent and independent variables show that the results of this study are relatively robust.

KEYWORDS

mood; air quality; network literature; emotion mining

CITE THIS PAPER

Zongyue Xue, Yutao Gong. Using Network Literature to Improve Mood during Episodes of Air Pollution: An Empirical Study of Online Comments. Advances in Educational Technology and Psychology (2020) 4: 52-67. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/aetp.2020.41010.

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